Rituals

There was a white bowl that was perfectly round, with no flat bottom to stand it on, with blue edges. I imagine it was enamel, though maybe that only sounds as if it might be right. It clearly hailed from the days before plastic bowls, when if something unbreakable was needed, this clanky item was the thing. When I fell off my bike and came into the house with a face red and ugly with tears and wails, it was filled with warm water mixed from the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. Then the bottle of Dettol - squat, with rounded shoulders - or the taller bottle of TCP with the ridged cap, came down from the high shelf above the loo, and a dash of it - no, that sounds too casual: maybe a capful carefully measured - was added, the golden liquid clouding briefly in the water before it dispersed.

A chunk of rough cotton wool was torn from the big roll, kept for no other purpose, it seemed, though it was singularly unsuited to this one, with all the little fibres to stick and be left behind; dunked, and used to wash the grit of tarmac out of the grazed knees, the skinned elbow. The warm water was soothing, but the Dettol stung like mad. "It'll hurt a little," she'd say, and I'd grit my teeth and wait for it. Or maybe I'd scrunch up my eyes in defence, but I always let her do it, because it was part of the ritual. This is what would make it heal, make it dry up nicely under the dusky-pink fabric plaster that was never the tone of anyone's flesh, least of all my pale white freckle-dusted red-head hue.

Then came a gentle dab of the violently pink antiseptic ointment, applied with the tip of the ring finger, the selection of the right size bandage from what remained of the assortment in the box, the pulling of the tiny red thread to remove the outer wrapper. Next, the careful lining up of the pad over the affected area, and the neat pulling off of the thin paper tabs, to make the sticky arms embrace my skin in perfect symmetry.

My father would advise, always, that the plaster should come off at night to let the wound dry out, even though the ads on telly proved, with one half of the little boy's neat cut covered and the other half exposed, that scrapes healed faster with Band-Aid. I still believed my Dad, though, because he knew everything.

------------------------------------

Much of this is the same, even here, even now. The canny symmetry of the band-aid and the magical way the sticky parts are uncovered and covering almost at the same moment never fails to provide solace. The fiddly red thread has gone, the pink ointment is still in my parents' house in Dublin, probably never to be used up, and I don't even know what Americans use in place of Dettol or TCP. I've heard tell of putting hydrogen peroxide on cuts, but that sounds unsafe to my still-Irish ears.

The plasters have to be called band-aids here or nobody understands you, and nowadays they're more often than not adorned with Dora or Buzz Lightyear or Spider-Man. My children are not so willing to let me wash their cuts as I was, and then they grab the band-aid and demand to do it themselves. It stays in place until it falls off in the pool or the bath, and I tell them, "There, that means it's better."

But the kiss, the final seal, the kiss-it-better: that never changes.

My drawers (fnar, fnar)

A few bad nights for Mabel meant I mostly fell off the exercise and housework wagon this week, but I'm proud to announce that our winter clothes are more or less sorted out. (Not B's; he's not included. He wears the same thing all year, minus some shorts and plus some sweaters in the winter. And if he wants them organized he can do his own.)

But my closet looks like this now:

The box holds bags/purses, and the tops/sweaters are organized thus: short sleeved, 3/4 sleeved, long sleeved, wool. The chunky wool ones are on top or hanging. Three pairs of boots are to the right of the box. I don't use a lot of hanging space because it's mostly dresses, skirts, and jackets, and I don't have a lot of any of those. You can see from this that I will be wearing a palate of mostly greens and dark reds/purples this season. Just like every season, because that's what I like.

I didn't take a before picture of the closet, but this is what my pyjamas/stuff drawer still looks like, so you can extrapolate from that:

I'm not saying this is all I have: most of my days are spent in jeans (stuffed-full jeans/chinos drawer not pictured), and I have another of yoga pants and one of underwear and one of nicer clothes I might wear once in a blue moon, and a whole suitcase full of things that don't fit but I'm not ready to give up on, and some more odds and ends in an under-the-bed storage thingy; but the important part is this - this is all the stuff I'm getting rid of:

See? Even the stuff I'm getting rid of is greens and dark reds.

The trash bag holds six pairs of shoes, one of which dates from pre-emigration - that is, more than 10 years ago. The toppling pile has about twenty t-shirts, tops and sweaters, and one pair of jeans that I never liked much. This has now been joined by some summer clothes Dash and Mabel have grown out of (that aren't nice enough to pass on to friends), and a few shirts B is discarding. All this will go to the next yard sale we're involved in, or the thrift store.

I got Dash to try on about twenty pairs of trousers, took away a few, and ascertained that my six-and-a-half-year-old still has 5T-length legs, just about, though his hips have grown out of the slimmest-fitting pants. Since he also refuses to wear any shirts that come below about mid-fly (because they might look like dresses and people might think he's a girl, yaknow), he doesn't need anything new.

(No photo because his room is dark like a man-cave, and his stuff is all stashed in drawers that don't make nice pictures.)

And then, I sorted out my box of things that might fit Mabel this season and reorganized her shelves. She can't reach everything herself, but she's getting more inclined to choose her own clothes, and I'm trying hard to hold my tongue if her choice is reasonable. At least I've put away the high-summer stuff so she'll be less tempted to try to wear a sundress or short shorts on a morning when it's 49 degrees outside. (That's about 9 celcius.)

Her clothes are in IKEA dividers (like this) that are supposed to separate things within drawers. When we moved in here, I had no dresser for Mabel and wasn't using these metal shelves for anything, so we stuck them in her closet and I found the dividers handy (since her clothes were still practically baby things that took up so little space). But her clothes still don't take up much space individually, and though I'm always on the lookout for a small white chest of drawers for her room, this system works fine for now. From the top, L-R, they hold pyjamas, socks, leggings, long-sleeved tops, capris/long shorts, t-shirts, underpants, bottoms/pants, and skirts/dresses that aren't hanging up. There are some chunky sweaters in the basket at the very bottom. The top shelf is a mess of hand-me-down shoes that don't fit yet and summer clothes awaiting sorting.

I could do with another box for the tights stashed on the top left, and I should think about bringing all the upper stuff down so that she can reach it more easily. She needs more dresses, especially since she's lately become very partial to them; I'm working on that and have enlisted e-Bay. I was very disappointed to miss a really good local used-children's-clothing sale last weekend, and I'll miss our local clothing swap next weekend, so my opportunities for snagging the perfect thing are reduced to the thrift store (always there) and the nursery-school yard sale in a few more weeks' time. And the clearance racks at Old Navy, Target, and Gap, of course.

In case you were wondering, this is what the other side of Mabel's closet looks like:

I wouldn't bother showing you, except for my genius sorting system comprising those two boxes. The brown one says "Too big; next season" and now holds summer things from this year that might still fit next, and any summer age 4 stuff I have. The Pampers box says: "Too big; distant future" and contains everything else I've amassed for her that will fit at some point when she's bigger That way I don't have to re-mark the boxes every year when they're no longer holding 4s but now 5s and 6s (Mabel, fitting age 6 clothes? Inconceivable!), and so on. 

Personally, I'm just pleased that I'm the sort of person who uses a semicolon when labelling a box of clothes. I think it says something about me, don't you? Yes. Well.

Nocturnal emotions (sorry)

I have that slightly dizzy feeling that no amount of coffee can remove. My eyes ache a tiny bit and there's a noise, or a pressure, or something, just behind my ears. I'm going to go right ahead and blame Mabel.

Ironically, she didn't have a bad night. The problem is that she didn't have it - the okay night - in her own bed, she had it in mine. When B and I were still downstairs last night, having caught up on both How I Met Your Mother and Doctor Who, and I was starting to think I should go to bed - around 10.15, then - we heard a little thump thump thump and thought, 'Oh-ho! What goings on are these?' I went upstairs and found Mabel prone on our bed, wailing and telling me that she was never going to sleep in her own bed again.

I suppose I could have put up a fight, but much the easiest thing seemed to be to go with the flow at that point. I started telling her Cinderella, and by the second sentence she was out for the count. (It's basically an automatic response now. And probably the only fairy tale I know.) So that was all well and good but now there was a three-year-old taking up a lot of space in our bed.

B decided to take Mabel's bed for the night. I suppose that made sense, but I still think he got off lightly. I got ready for bed and assessed my options. She was right in the middle, but I decided there was slightly more room on my usual side, so that's where I got in, with Mabel's back to me. She wiggled backwards to get closer. After five minutes, I got out and walked around to the other side of the bed and lay down there instead. She moved towards me. I left her head where it was and pushed the rest of her body away from me, diagonally across the bed. Her head nudged closer to me.  She was on top of the covers and I was trying to be underneath them. And so it continued for at least half the night.

At some later point I realised that she was actually sleeping on the other side like a normal human in a queen-size bed, but by then the damage was done. I'll take back her father any day. I won't even complain about the snoring.

Days

Some days, it all seems too fragile to possibly hold together. Everything could spin off its axis at any moment, and we'd all go flying into the great beyond, scattered like seeds, inconsequential tiny parts no longer of a whole. We've shored things up here and there, piecemeal, against slings and arrows, but fortune is outrageous and doesn't care much. One gust of wind, a wrong turn, a decision made by someone else, might throw it all off.

(I don't know how people who don't have all that I have stay in the game at all. I would just sit in a corner and cry. No, I wouldn't. I'd do what I had to, but I wouldn't have time to think fancy thoughts and write them down.)

Other days, everything hums along nicely, and life is easy. (A little too easy. Nemesis must be waiting to clobber me.) Time stretches out to include the things we want to include; a trip to the playground can last as long as everyone's happy. Then, snap. The lack of a snack makes one turn on a dime and casts a long, shouting, crying, kicking shadow over the rest of the day.

As Alexander's wise mother said, some days are just like that.

Seasonal produce

I am here to tell you that if you didn't think you liked eggplant (or aubergine, because we're fancy like that in Ireland) it's because you were doing it wrong. Specifically, like me, you may have never bothered to salt and drain it, because who has time for that sort of thing? People who know how delicious it makes eggplant, that's who. I just recently bothered, for the first time, to take my eggplant out a bit ahead of time - an hour is good, in the morning is great - slice it thickly, and spread the slices out on some kitchen paper. Then I shake salt all over them, both sides, top with more kitchen paper (paper towels, whatever you call 'em), and weigh it all down with a few hefty cookbooks. I just did it now while my waffle popped out of the toaster, and the butter still melted by the time I was done.

Later on, when you put the eggplant into whatever you want - this, perhaps, or just ratatouille, or vegetarian lasagne, which is what I'm planning today - it will turn out to be both chewy and creamy, and a most wonderful vehicle for the garlic that I exhort you to use liberally. If I was Nigella Lawson, the word unctuous would be bursting forth right about now, but I'm not, so I won't go quite that far.

The other thing I've been doing lately is massaging my kale. (I told Facebook about it and got a few entertainingly salacious comments. My work there is done.) From being a person who never even thought about kale to one who decided she didn't like it, I have lately come down heavily in favour of the curly dark-green leaves. It started with this recipe for quinoa salad with kale and cranberries, which I ate for most of the summer. A little fiddly what with the roasting of the walnuts, but totally addictive. You can leave out the shallot (or even the onion) if that's too much trouble, and you won't miss it.

But then I got even lazier, and decided cooking the kale was too much trouble for a salad. And I remembered something a friend had said once, in my pre-kale-eating days (when I was offloading a bunch of donated kale onto her, actually, because I didn't think I'd use it) about massaging kale. How ridiculous, I thought. Maybe you and your kale are on those sort of terms, but I prefer to keep mine at fork's length, thank you. But about a week ago, I googled "massaged kale" and came up with all sorts of perfectly reasonable suggestions. Basically, you put your (washed and de-stemmed) leaves in a bowl with a shake of salt and a sprinkle of oil, and you work it with your hands until the fibres break down, turning this tough saute-only veg into a perfectly nice wilted salad leaf. (I have been told that you can also just leave it alone for an hour or so and the dressing will do the work on its own, but I like instant gratification.)

Then you can put a bit of what you fancy on top and call it salad. Some dried cranberries and a shake of roasted sunflower seeds with a drizzle of red wine vinegar or avocado and lemon juice are two versions I tried last week, but there are a ton of options. I think you need something a little sweet to counterbalance the leaves, but probably just a pinch of sugar or a drop of honey in your dressing would do the trick quite well.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to stop getting hungry again at 2pm when I've had a big bowl of kale salad for lunch at midday. When I find out, I'll let you know, because otherwise it seems like an ideal way to counteract the effects of the muffins.

Green Card (and other movies)

Sometimes I think that blogging is exactly what's wrong with the economy.

Okay, maybe that's not quite it, but it seems that the free time needed to read about the minutae of other people's lives, and maybe even write about your own, could be better used doing other things. Especially when many people who read blogs read them at work, when they are actually being paid to do other things, or should be, except that maybe they haven't any other things to do.

Let me clarify. If you're reading this at work, I don't mean you, and please don't go away. You are a boon to the economy, I'm sure. But I first started to read blogs when I was chronically bored at work, and I'm pretty sure that's the only reason I ever read through all the archives of Amy, Kristen*, and Julia, to name a few. There I was at a desk with a computer and literally nothing to do, so my self-assigned project for the next few days became to read through someone else's backstory. If I did have something to do, I needed to string it out, so I'd read blogs in between short bursts of work.

I'm not the only overeducated underused employee that ever existed, so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who ever did this. I'm not the only person with a degree in English to find herself sitting behind the receptionist's desk or waiting for someone else to schedule a meeting so that she could update a handbook that nobody would read anyway. On a global-economy scale, that's a lot of unharnessed energy.

It occurred to me today that if I had been driven enough, lucky enough, and interested enough in something, I could perhaps be somewhere very different today, with a big fancy career and a big fancy life. (I'm very lucky and interested in various things, but I'm the first to admit that I'm not very driven.) But then, I thought, would I be any happier than I am right now?

Nope. I'm pretty much as happy as whoever Larry was. There are niggly things that I'd like to have more money to spend on - outsourcing housework, getting my hair professionally coloured, buying all my clothes from J Crew - but in the big picture, this is where I want to be. There's the tiny issue of that hypothetical third baby, but I think in order for that to happen I'd have to go back in time and have got married a few years earlier.

Which would have required me to win the visa lottery the first year I applied instead of the third, let's say. (You note that marrying someone else is not an option. He's my lobster.) And maybe B and I needed those years apart to make it work now, anyway.

And then I thought, what if I'd never got the visa? The Diversity Visa Lottery is something many Americans have never heard of: the government offers a number of resident alien visas every year to countries whose emigrants have been under a certain number for the previous five years. If you're lucky enough to be picked, once you can show that you're reasonably employable and enough money to not be on the streets straight away (and not a communist), you get your very own green card. My chances of winning the year I did were about 1 in 100, and you're no more likely to get picked the tenth year you enter than the first. I was lucky.

If I hadn't got my green card when I did, I don't know what we'd have done. B could have come home after his PhD, but to no job. I could have gone over illegally, but it's very unlikely I would have. We could have got married straight away and I would have been legal but not eligible to work (I think), which would have made me feel that we began things on an uneven keel and under some level of duress.

It's all very Sliding Doors-y to peer down the wrong end of the telescope at what you might have done if your life had turned a different way. And while Gwynneth Paltrow's haircut was cute and John Hannah's accent was dead sexy, it wasn't a very good film, and the ending left us all feeling pretty frustrated.

It's probably better to just work with what you've got and move forward as you are. As I am, damn lucky. For one thing, if anything had been even a tiny bit different, I probably wouldn't have this to entertain you with:

*Not there; at her old, and sadly currently defunct, blogs, "Debaucherous and Dishevelled" and "Better Now".

No muffins

Mabel is at a playdate across the road, and I have an extra hour and a half to mess around with this morning. Except for the part where I had to go down to school to get her anyway, find that she'd re-changed her mind (it's her prerogative) about going home with her friend, install her carseat into my friend's car even though she had a perfectly good brand-new one there for Mabel to use, and kiss her goodbye. Then we both drove back up the hill home and got out of our cars on either side of the road. She unloaded three happy children into her house, and I unloaded nobody at all into mine.

Tomorrow, I'll return the favor, but hopefully with 100% less redundant driving around, since Mabel's friend fits perfectly in Dash's (otherwise empty on this trip) carseat and is not nearly as fussy as she is.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly trying to use my free time - now that my "two children, two schools, five mornings" fantasy is actually coming true - to impose some sort of order on this place and my mentality. There's a very gradual hint of meal planning, winter-clothes sorting, and even house-cleaning starting to make its way into the way things are being done. I've even gone running again and started back at my old pilates class.

Which is just as well, because sorting winter clothes has led me to discover that I have far more pairs of jeans than anyone needs, and that too many of them are too small, because I seem to be taking up more space than I was at the start of the summer. Since Mabel is now nursing a lot less and I didn't exercise when the weather was warm - so much for those good intentions - this is not rocket science, but it's still disappointing. I'll probably never again be as skinny as I was when I had an 18-month-old nursing every five minutes (or so it seemed) and I know there are good things about that, but it's a pity that now I have more freedom to go out (a) shopping and (b) socializing, it's harder to look in the mirror and be thrilled with what I see.

So I have two options: I can stop looking in the mirror and tell myself that it's not important; or I can try to take a little exercise a little more often, stop giving myself the same size portions as the marathon runner in the family, and lay off the cookies.

One of these things will probably happen, but I'm not making any promises. (Because I function best on reverse psychology, so vowing to become thin and waif-like would lead instantly to telling myself to go take a short walk off a long pier and find some muffins wherever I land.)

Defying the patriarchy of language

Mabel and I went to get Dash from school yesterday afternoon as the storm continued to threaten. It was warm and very windy, but not yet as dark as I'd expect if the rain was on the way any minute. (Still, we drove the half mile there just in case.)

It seemed like we weren't the only people to arrive early. Everyone wanted to get their kids and get them home before whatever tornadoes we were in store might come. The kindergarteners came out first, as they do. After a few minutes, the teachers started herding the ones who hadn't immediately been retrieved back into the building. Then they called everyone else in too. We scuttled in as the first drops began to fall.

"Did it turn into a warning?" I asked, meaning the hurricane watch. "Yes," they said. I eyed the roof of the gym we were standing in and decided it looked just like those metal roofs you see mangled and twisted off buildings that have been hit by hurricanes. I also eyed my very pregnant friend and asked her if she felt like going into labor right this moment. She thought she might hang on a bit. All of a sudden the rain hit the roof with a thunderous noise. I wondered if we'd all become like one big grumpy family as we bedded down in the school for the night.

Mabel and I moved into the hallway where the roof looked more solid, and milled around some more. They told us we could go down to the classrooms and find our children, so we went to pick up Dash from the computer room. He and Mabel were getting a bit high spirited (let's say), so I herded them over to a corner where I felt they wouldn't be in anyone's way if they ran around in circles for a minute.

The minute was up, and I decided things were crazy enough without having my children ricocheting into the walls. I stopped Dash and tried to talk some sobriety into Mabel by invoking the power of authority.

- Stop running around. See that lady over there? That's the principal. She'll send us out in the rain if you keep running like that.
- That's the principal? But she's a girl.
- Yes, ladies can be principals too.
- But she shouldn't be called a principal then.
...
- Oh, you think she should be a princessipal?
- Yes!

Or a queenipal, she said later.

Then the tornado warning was called off, the rain eased a bit, and we all went home. 

Storm's a-comin'

Nobody dies in Ireland from tornadoes, or earthquakes, or hurricanes. Nobody dies there because some guy decides to kill a bunch of people at the cinema and has an assualt rifle to do it with either. Ireland is a calm, if more often overcast, place to live.

Today here we are under a tornado watch until 7pm. That doesn't mean there is a tornado, or that there will be a tornado, but just that conditions will be conducive to tornadoes and we should pay attention in case it turns into a tornado warning, which is when you go down to the basement for as long as you can stand to keep the kids entertained in the room where broken and unwanted things go to be kept from the children.

We live on the Eastern Seaboard, as they call it, which is not really prone to tornadoes the way the mid-west is. Which is good, because they scare the bejaysus out of me, but in a way it would be nice because at least there they have sirens that go off all over town when there's a tornado warning. Here, you have to happen to tune into the TV or radio at the right time, or see an alert on your computer, or you might miss it altogether. There has been more than one day when I've been told after the fact that we were under a tornado warning for half the morning and I never even realised that I could have been swept up like Dorothy and deposited under a house like the Wicked Witch of the West.

There are big trees right behind our house, and though they've been inspected (a year ago, I think) to make sure none were in imminent danger of toppling, it's always a possibility. I know people who know people who were just missed by a huge branch coming through their roof in the middle of the night, who happened to have gone to the bathroom or they would have been skewered in their beds. Not everyone gets to be lucky.

I have an ominous feeling and I wish it would go away. I had a dream just before I woke up that someone I only know second-hand on the Internet had died. I'm pretty sure dreams are just random firings of synapses, but it wasn't a particularly pleasant way to start the day. I've spent all morning accomplishing nothing, and mooching.

I prefer Irish weather, is what I'm saying.

Blame it on

Dash and Mabel are both doing dance classes again this term. Mabel's is called "Pre-Dance," a step up from last Spring's "Creative Movement" but with much the same group of children and much the same activities. Dash's is called "Pre-Jazz" and he's one of two boys among a bevy of girls. He loves it, and I hope the girls realise how sought-after a boy is in a dance class. (They probably don't.) He took his umbrella to the farmer's market on Sunday morning, hoping for rain so he could do a spot of Gene Kelly. It was only very slightly overcast, but he wouldn't leave it in the car and I spotted him twirling it later on.

On Saturday there was a blues festival in our local downtown. We went down, town, to see the goings-on and get Dash a haircut. While the boys went to the barber's, Mabel and I procured some bread and an apple and sat on a step watching the band. They were pretty good.

The sound of a saxophone always does something to my tummy. The good sort of something, like you used to get remembering a particularly good kiss the night before with your new boyfriend. Jazzy bluesy saxophoney electric-base-guitary music is probably my favourite sort of sound, especially when it makes your hips wiggle and your toes twitch. But children have no respect for art, and once Dash emerged - with the side parting he'd requested making him look like a quintessential English schoolboy of the 1940s - they both wanted to be climbing trees rather than sitting around watching old men in Hawaiian shirts plunk and plink and croon and badum-tssshhhh.

We moved on, up to a playground for a while, and then back down past the music again towards the car in the hopes of finding some holy barbeque for dinner. (Local Catholic church fundraiser.) On the way we met some friends and there was some more delay. We were behind the stage now, but the music was still loud and clear in the area where we were. Dash, in a dark-blue t-shirt and tan shorts, was at the top of a flight of fire-escape steps. His father (as it happened, wearing a mid-blue t-shirt and brownish chinos) was at the bottom. They boogied towards, and away from, and back towards each other again, one going up and the other down, to meet in the middle; and if a jealous Mabel hadn't been physically turning my head away so that I couldn't enjoy the spectacle, I would have been very much enjoying it.

Another of those moments to capture, really, only this time I needed a video camera and I didn't have a thing. It's enough to make one covet an iPhone, really. I love a man who can dance.

Freeze frame

Green and pink and blonde and sunshine. A small warm body pressed against me, smooth skin and laughing grey-green eyes three inches from mine. A breeze dappling the shadows of the leaves and the swoop of a swing.

Yesterday, Mabel and I were killing some time in the playground. I sat on the swing beside hers, and she immediately hopped down and demanded a "spider". (This is what they call it when one child sits astride another on the swing, so their legs all dangle down to look like a four-legged arachnid. When she sits on me, it's not so even, but it's very cosy.) She sat up on my lap and hugged me tight as I launched us off the ground, her head nestled into my chest.

After a few minutes she moved her hands from my back to the chains of the swing and leaned out from me, laughing as we swung up so high and swept down so low. The viewfinder of my mind captured her hot-pink tutu frothing out under a minty-green smock, the intermittent September sunshine, tiny lens flares on my speckled glasses. An uncomplicated few minutes of simple love after a difficult morning.

It was one of those moments. You think you'll never forget them, but you'd like a camera just in case.

I didn't have my camera, but I can write it and keep it here, and that will have to do.

Pop psychology

I read a definition somewhere (somewhere, I don't know, don't pressure me, okay) of an introvert as someone who needs solitude to recharge and an extrovert as someone who recharges by being in the company of others.

I'm honestly not sure where this puts me - I think probably more on the introvert side of things, as I can't imagine feeling re-energized by being in a large group of people - but on the other hand, I do always enjoy being in a group that I feel part of. So I suppose it's not that I seek solitude, but more that it is always there on either side of time with others. Maybe this is because of my only-child status - the default was being on my own. I can imagine that for a child from a bigger family, the default would be a group setting, whether you liked it or not.

Anyway, I'm coming to the conclusion - now, for the moment - that contrary to expectations, Dash is my extrovert and Mabel is my introvert. If you know either of them in person, at least the second of these statements might come as a surprise.

Dash, even though he has gone through stages of crippling shyness (see four-and-a-half, for instance), really loves being in a group setting once he feels comfortable there. I think that's why he's enjoying school so much this year - he knows he belongs there, and it's his rightful space among others. He has always hated being alone - sending him to his room would create more tantrums than there were to begin with - and he is still incapable of playing on his own for any length of time. He craves company.

His sister, in contrast, has always seemed like the outgoing one, but she's also the one who can entertain herself quite happily. She really seems to need time to immerse herself, several times a day, in play with the dollhouse people and the dinosaurs and the elephants and the dogs and the Strawberry Shortcakes with all their intricate family dynamics and crazy goings-on. I think it's how she processes everything that happens. (I know I said she's going to be a lawyer, but she'll be a writer too. I'd put money on it.) And at school, her challenge is often to play (nicely) with others instead of just doing her own thing.

Of course, their personalities aren't set in stone, now or perhaps ever. And I think intro/extroversion is more of a scale than an either/or. But it's fascinating to see these little pointers emerge, and to wonder what use, if any, I can make of this pop-psychologizing.

Inside the vortex

I have approximately twenty minutes before I have to go back to Mabel's school. I left her at school about half an hour ago. This does not seem exactly the way my leisurely mornings were meant to go.

Poor Mabel was very tired this morning, piggybacking on yesterday's tiredness due to her late bedtime the night before, and adding to it a newly-congested wakeup at midnight, one at 3 when she was wide awake for far longer than I was, and one at 5 when I had to compromise my principles and give her some boob in the hopes of getting her back to the sleep she so badly needed. I don't think it worked, but I can't exactly tell because I was only half awake myself, but she bounced out of bed at 6 and I told B it was his turn. Then I went back to my own bed (since Mabel had taken the duvet downstairs with her) and dreamed about impossible things for a delightful hour and a half.

So by the time B and Dash left for school and I was trying to get Mabel out of her beloved tutu and into regular school clothes ("it's not a skirt, it's a tutu" and "because it's delicate and I don't want to get it dirty at school" - she can be reasonable, sometimes) she was busy working herself into a state about how much she didn't want me to leave her at school. She wanted me to stay, or else her to stay with me wherever I was going.

Digging down into her wails to find out what, exactly, the problem is, is a process that leads to a sort of vertigo. I winkled out of her the tiniest point of objection - that she doesn't like the rule that you only take one piece of paper to dry your hands with - by burrowing down the layers through I don't want to go to school, to I don't like that they make me blow my nose, to I don't want to wash my hands, to the nub of it.

But then I had to reverse up and out of the rabbit-hole again to figure out whether this was really the problem or whether this was the one small thing she was choosing to represent the whole, which was that she was too tired to face the idea of functioning without the buffer of me being there.

When I'd offered all the solutions I could to the hand-towel issue, and was still making no headway, I decided to tackle the problem from the other end. I still wanted her to go to school, and I still had to go to the post office, but I could come and be with her earlier than the school morning would finish. I promised to come at snack time. She agreed. So I took that and ran with it, literally and metaphorically.

When we got to school, she cried and I almost fell at the penultimate hurdle - getting her out of the car. But she agreed to come inside to talk to her teacher about it. When we got in and she washed her hands, she chose a book to read. I told her I was going to read it, and then I would tell her teacher that I'd come back early, and then I was going to the post office, and that she could hide under the table until she'd finished crying if she didn't want anyone to see her. (Just like her brother.)

And that's what we did. I'm grateful that I don't have any other commitments at this stage, so that I can ease her into the school year gently, if that's what it takes. I like that I can listen to her fears and work out a compromise that works for both of us. I hope I can remember to look for her real emotions and take them into account, whatever happens, no matter how much it seems like she's just being a drama llama.

And now I have to go again.

Home free

It's seven forty and I'm home free.

That is, I'm home, and I'm free of children. The one is asleep, the other is on his way and doesn't need assistance, and there's a glass of red wine beside me. The payoff for early risers is early bedtimes like this, and even if they don't happen every night, it's great when they do. There's also a big basket of laundry to be folded, but I quite like laundry actually. It's one of the few housekeeping tasks I don't mind keeping up with. (I used to iron, even, but that was a long time ago.)

The weather has broken, and like flipping a switch, my brain has turned on and got busy. Or, maybe more accurately, my body. My will to do things other than flollop around complaining, at least.

We had a big storm on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday all the oppressive heat and humidity had been scrubbed out of the air, leaving shining clear sunlight. It's almost (positively, even) chilly in the mornings, suddenly. I'm not pushing the bedcovers off my body any more. I might have to find some socks soon.

• I've baked two batches of baked goods (banana spice crumb bars and oatmeal muffins).
• I've gone running two mornings in a row. Only a mile, and I only ran half of it, and then maybe a bit more, but it's a start.
• I've started a star chart for the children, wherein they get stars for tidying up and also for using the bathroom more independently (Mabel) and practising some reading (Dash). So far they each have a lot more stars for the practising than the tidying, but I don't care. It's establishing an expectation, and I don't want to have to shell out at Target too soon.

Mabel has complained about going to school for the past two days. I've left her there anyway, stonehearted mother that I am, even though she was crying and telling me not to go. Yesterday it was all for show, and she was smiling as she played with all the dollhouse people when I looked in the window five minutes later. Today she was more tired and a little more upset, as she'd had a late night and two wakeups yesterday - not my fault if she refuses to fall asleep for her father; I was at a board meeting - but I still stood firm.

On the one hand, I don't want to set the precedent of letting her stay home, or - worse - relenting once we get there and taking her back with me. School is school, and we go unless we're sick. On the other hand, the child is three, and it's not like she's missing anything vital to the curriculum if I let her play hookie once in a blue moon. With Dash, once or twice he made a fuss and I let him off - because I know my kid, and he never did that; so when he did, I believed him and it didn't come back to bite me. But Mabel is a different child, and if you give her an inch she'll take a mile, and if I give her an inch she'll probably run off with the whole kit and kaboodle and never come back at all. So no, not doing that. School it is.

Still, I was relieved to come back from my too-short jaunt to Bethesda to see my friend's new baby (tiny! squishy! asleep on me!) to find Mabel's classmates all happily unbitten and her teachers still looking me in the eye. She'd had a bit of an episode when they wiped her nose, but she told me that she felt better after snack, and I agreed that that was often the way.

In fact, might be time for a post-prandial, laundry-folding snack over here right now.

The week that was

So in spite of the fact that last week I had two children in school every day, any frittering away of time on my own I might have done was purely symbolic.

• Monday was Labor Day, of course, so that didn't count.
• On Tuesday, Dash went to school and so did Mabel, but then I spent most of the morning sorting out paperwork in the nursery school's office, as part of my board committment this year. (Last year I was in charge of housekeeping, which as you can imagine was not really my forte, but gave me a foot in the door. This year I have sidestepped into "Membership", which means I get to do filing and pester people about submitting their forms in a timely fashion. Next year I aim to rise to the exalted heights of Secretary, when I will be allowed to take minutes.)
• On Wednesday, I was co-oping in Mabel's classroom.
• On Thursday, I had to do some more paperwork.
• On Friday, I finished up the paperwork by double-checking exactly who was still delinquent with which forms and signatures, and ran away to the optician's to get the nose-pads replaced on my glasses.

Yes, it was just that exciting.

I also dropped into Old Navy while waiting for the optician's to open and picked up a pair of chinos, but that's neither here nor there.

My point is that I've barely begun to live, freedom-wise. Today I went go to Safeway and hung out a load of laundry, and that pretty much took up all the two and a half hours I had before it was time to go and get child #1 again. When I thought I was going to fit in freelancing I don't know.

Saharan

The children have a Pavlovian response to sitting in the car before any journey - they demand their water. And snacks, if I have any worth at all. I am to blame for this, of course, having dutifully plied my toddlers with sippy cups whenever we went somewhere, but I can't help thinking that at this point it's time to wean them off the automatic craving. Plus, I'm not thirsty, so I don't see why they should be. (The fact that their father probably would be, and my family tends towards the non-liquid-needing - I dunno, we're camels or succulents or something - does not yield my mercy, because I'm just mean that way.)

Yesterday we got into the car to pick B up from work, since the other car was getting an oil change.

The children, in unison: Where's my water? I want water!
Me: There is no water.
The children: [Suitably horrified by my maternal deficiencies.]
Me: We'll be there in five minutes and back in another five. You don't need water.
The children: [Still feeling water is necessary.]
Me: You'll survive. You're not going to die.
Mabel: My feelings are dying.
Me: Oh, really?
Mabel: Yes. Tomorrow my feelings will be dead.

The melodrama is strong with that one.

Present imperfect

Mabel's a biter.

There. I've said it. It's the worst thing your child can be, until they grow up and become a druggie or   a republican or a dirty hippie or whatever your bag isn't, baby.

I'm sick of blogs that make you think everyone else's children are perfect, and of making myself feel that I'm a crappy parent because of this one thing. So I'm telling you here and now that this is what's been going on, and it's not fun. I'm also willing to bet I'm not the only one of you who has had a child with a horrible phase, and I think we need to talk about it.

When she was younger, maybe a year ago or more, she went through a biting phase. Happily, it was short-lived and I didn't have to be the mother of the biter. But now she's doing it again so, for now, that's what I am, again.

I know when she does it and how it happens. She's not attention-seeking, and I don't think she's even pushing boundaries. When she's seeking attention, she leaps up and down and rudely interrupts my conversations with adults. When she pushes her boundaries, she walks up the down-slide smirking and casting sideways glances at me to make sure I see how good she is at being bad. This is not how she bites.

It happens when she's tired. Because right now we're in a huge sleep upheaval - the good sort where she is finally, praise the lord, learning to sleep all night, alone, in her own bed, without waking - on the days after the nights where that doesn't happen for one reason or another, she's exhausted. I daren't let her nap midday  - last time I did that, a one-hour nap led to a three-hour-late bedtime, and the whole, horrible, cycle was perpetuated. So we just have to plough through, and sometimes other people are the innocent victims.

When she bites, it's because, although she may look perfectly content from the outside - watching tv, playing happily with other children, going about her own business - she's actually teetering on the brink of exhaustion. Something small happens, and she snaps. Her instant, instinctive, uncontrollable response to the anger she feels then, is to bite.

I have a temper. I do, really. It's been tamped down by time and effort, but I still remember the feeling of having to lash out. I still remember slapping friends who got my goat so badly I had to do something about it. (And I was probably nine or so for that memory - I can't imagine what I did when I was three.) I remember making a conscious decision to snap a pencil in half rather than hurt someone. It wasn't nearly as satisfying. So she probably got it from me, is what I'm saying.

I've also been the mother of the bitten, when the shoe was on the other foot, and that's no fun. I know how people feel about biters; I've felt it, I've listened to the gossip, I've avoided certain children and watched them like a hawk. I would not blame anyone I know for feeling that way about Mabel at this point in time.

Three-year-olds do not have much impusle control. It is easily eroded by fatigue, hunger, a long day, a frustrating scenario. They can ask nicely and use their words and share beautifully and even sometimes delay gratification in the morning. But come the witching hour, all bets are off. We've talked about feeling angry, and things you can do when you feel angry, like stamping your foot or jumping up and down, or punching a cushion. When she's tired, there is no space of recognition between the feeling and the reaction, so there's no time for me to redirect her or for her, yet, to redirect herself.

I have thought a lot about this lately. We're using a star chart for other things, we're bringing more order into our lives now that school has started, we are settling into a routine. I am trying with all my might to get Mabel's sleep on track, because I am 100% sure that's the key to all of this. That, and time. Time for her to not be three-and a-half any more. Time for her to stop doing it. Time for her to work out what to do with her anger, even when she's not feeling her best. Time for the bitten to forgive and forget.

Time for me to believe in her, and in me.

Roll o' blog

It's been a long time since I gave due props to some of my favourite blogs and their writers, so I think I'll do it again. They're (mostly) over there in the sidebar links, but you might not click them without a little prodding.

Prod, prod. Here you go...

I mentioned A Girl and a Boy last time, but I thought you should know that Leah (not her real name) has just had a new, once-again-adorable, baby boy known bloggily as Fox. Her elder offspring is just a month older than my Mabel, and even more precocious (as if that were possible). She's married to the dashing and handsome Simon, they all live in the Bay Area, she's both arty and crafty, she takes lovely photos, and she's a book editor. Obviously, I want to be her when I grow up. (Though I suppose I'll keep my own precocious poppets.)

A Half-Baked Life is new to my roll, though for a long time I'd just click over to JeCaThRe's blog and read her from the link there. Then I met Justine in person, and it occured to me that I should do her the justice of giving her a link myself. Her posts are thoughtful, beautifully written, and almost always come with a delicious recipe.

Oh, but Bread, Wine, Salt wasn't in my list before either, probably because that list came before my friend JeCaThRe divulged to me that she had a blog. And as I could have predicted, it was impeccably designed and written, and filled with fascinating food and thought-provoking contemplation. Sometimes I get to taste-test this food in person, which I have to admit is a bonus of telling your friends about your blog just in case they have one too. (Her blogroll is also a fount of foodie and other goodness.)

Bethany Actually is a friend of Secret Agent Josephine, whom I have been reading for a long time, since her daughter, Bug, was born. When Bethany moved out this way and Brenda (SAJ) came to see her and hosted a teeny tiny blog meetup, I went nervously along. They were both so nice and so welcoming and I'm flattered to say that Bethany has been reading and commenting on my blog ever since. Bethany moves cross-country at the drop of a hat, homeschools an eight-year-old while pursuing a toddler, takes photographs with a big-ass camera, and  paints pottery with custom patterns and Firefly quotes. What else is there?

Damien Owens was at one time my flatmate, as a result of being a co-worker who needed a place to live when I needed a person to move into the other bedroom. Then he wrote a novel, sold it, gave up the day job and bought his very own apartment, leaving me bereft. (No, actually my best friend was in a position to move in then, so it worked out nicely.) But he's still a damn funny Irish guy, and best of all, he's now a famous screenwriter. The second season of his series Trivia is about to air on Irish TV. If you're there, I recommend it. If you're not, at least you can read his blog. (And follow his tweets, which I think are pretty amusing. But don't tell him I said so.)

I started reading Erin J. Shea's blog back when it was "Lose the Bhudda", during my voyeuristic foray into weight-loss blogs. (I say voyeuristic because I had no notion of losing weight myself. I just wasn't reading parenting blogs yet.) Since then she got married, had a baby, and is still writing compellingly about mindful eating and exercise as well as being a working parent and a thoughtful mother.

Stacey at Is There Any Mommy Out There is one of the quieter heroes of mommyblogging. (I think. Maybe everyone knew her but me, but it took me a while to notice this blog that every now and then people would link to.) She describes life with four children and an enormous dog in beautiful, vivid, sometimes gut-wrenching, prose.

The thing about coming out to people you know in real life as a blogger is that sometimes they are too. My Thoughts Exactly and Thrift Store Mama are both written by local friends to whom I'm grateful for making my real and online lives intersect.

But then. Recently, through a link in The Irish Times (I think it was an article on placentas, but maybe it was something else), I finally found the blogs I knew must be out there but I'd never been able to find - a rich seam of Irish parenting blogs with an AP/pro-breastfeeding sort of leaning. There really are crunchy mamas over there too.

So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Áine (pronounced Awnya) at and my baby, Ciara [keera] at Ouch My Fanny Hurts (which is much a ruder thing to say in Ireland than it is in the US), and Mind The Baby - three informative, entertaining, and lovely blogs that I will be reading a lot more of in the future, as well as further exploring the blogrolls of. I'm so happy to find my people. (My other people, I mean.) (You're all my people.) (Group hug.)

Finally, if you have no intention of reading Fifty Shades of Grey but you'd like to better take the piss out of it, go here, and enjoy: Red Lemonade. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

Safe, respectful, and kind

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a long weekend.

It started badly, when on Saturday morning Mabel was Postively Awful and had to be removed from a birthday party in disgrace, in which unhallowed state she remained all afternoon while her brother got to go to the carnival. I won't tell you exactly what she did (to protect the innocent), but when asked to say sorry to the injured party, she blew a raspberry at him and all the parents present had a hard time not bursting out laughing. She's got some comic timing, all right.

But no, it was a Bad Thing she done, and she knew it. (Which is why she blew the raspberry. When in trouble, her refuge is to become ever more defiant. This will not serve her well.)

That evening, exhausted from riding all the rides, Dash had a bit of an outburst over getting water instead of milk because we were almost out of milk. This was completely unreasonable, and he got uncharacteristically defiant as well, with the result that lightsabering privileges were revoked for two days. He felt this was unfair; doubly so the next day when it turned out "two days" did not mean part of the first day and you get it back on the second day, but a full 48 hours.

In general, I felt things were going badly. It was not nice, all this shouting and banging down of fists (that was Dash). So today, we did that cheesy-sounding thing and called a family meeting, wherein we all came up with household rules and talked about what might happen when people didn't keep the rules, and what things people enjoyed that we could all do when the rules were followed. (This last is a bit hand-wavy, but I wanted something positive in the mix.)

Dash was entirely on board. He loved it. I would have to say that this sort of thing is made for five- or six-year-olds. (Not knowing much about sevens or older, I'm not sure when the rebellion kicks in again.) He had a great time laying down the law (coming up with rules) and telling me the things he'd like to do in those halcyon times when everyone's well-behaved (have a costume parade, an art competition, and races). He pronounced that it was never ever fair to take away (or threaten to take away) his light saber.

I went over the things people had done that had got them into trouble lately, and manipulated the evidence so that everything fell neatly into the three categories I wanted the rules to cover, so that we could get them down to something concise and memorable that would work for every infraction worth fighting over. (I mention this because it's something I read on the internet, I think originally from Moxie's excellent frequent commenter Hedra, and not because I made it up myself. I think it's so good you might want to use it too.) Basically, we want to be 1) Safe, 2) Respectful, and 3) Kind. If what you do is all those things and I'm still getting my knickers in a twist about it, talk to me and I'll be more reasonable.

I love this (when I remember it) because it makes sense from their perspective as well as mine, and because it helps me pick my battles. When I first read it, back when Dash was a little one, I thought "Well, that's all very nice but I'm sure I can come up with three equally valid concepts that are my own." This many years later I'm much more exhasuted and beaten down and quite happy that Hedra has done it already.

I'm not saying we've solved all our discipline problems in one fell swoop. Mabel, in particular, spent the whole meeting jumping around the sofa (no matter how much we pointed out that it was neither safe nor respectful (of property)) like a marmoset on speed, so I'm not sure the concept works so well for threes. But what had been nagging at me before was a sense that perhaps the children felt we were pulling these rules out of our arses whenever we felt like shouting, and that perhaps we were ambushing them with big punishments for small things that had escalated due to bad management. This way at least everyone knows what we're trying to acheive.

My next step, mostly for Mabel, is to reclaim my copy of Adventures in Gentle Discipline from the friend I lent it to, and check How to Talk so Kids will Listen out of the library again. And I will remember to talk about expectations for behavior before we do things, to remind and direct with positive terms, and to praise the good actions whenever I see them.

Mabel goes back to school tomorrow, and right now she's all fired up with plans to be polite and sweet and say please and thank-you all over the gaff. Option B, of course, is HellChild, and the unmentioned option C is that she throws a wobbler like last year and refuses to let me leave her sight. (I will be unmoved, mostly because for at least the first half hour I've to hang around the school office doing admin-y stuff anyway.)

And then I will go outside and join the other mothers doing the Happy Dance of Freedom, and go to Target on my own.